SMALL-TOWN WOES In 2002: the Romney-Healey ticket lost in the state’s 10 largest cities but won the rest of the state by nearly 200,000 votes. Healey would be wise not to piss off the small towns.

In the last few weeks, Mitt Romney has used his line-item veto to strike down more than $750 million in state spending, smiting “pork” in three major spending bills: a supplemental state budget, an economic stimulus package, and the fiscal year (FY) 2007 state budget. Along with cuts to big, statewide programs, the governor pulled funding for smaller, local projects earmarked for towns from Cape Cod to the Berkshires: bicycle trails, theater renovations, health-care facilities, senior centers, festivals, and more.

The governor’s rapid-fire rejections have sparked little controversy in Boston political circles, where it’s shrugged off as just Mitt being Mitt — more interested in convincing Republican presidential-primary voters of his fiscally conservative ways than in what happens to Bay State residents after his term here mercifully expires. Besides, the legislature is expected to override most of his cuts, and has already begun doing so.

But beyond the Hub, Romney’s cuts are bleeding all over the news pages. ROMNEY LEAVES COMMUNITY TRACK IN THE DUST, cried a headline in the Lynn Daily Item. A headline in the Worcester Telegram warned: TAX-CREDIT VETO THREATENS REHAB OF OLD THEATER. A blunter one in the Berkshire Eagle called Romney CLUELESS TO THE END.

“I think [the veto] is a major political issue,” says Robert DeLeo (D-Winthrop), chair of the House Ways and Means Committee. “On many of these items, I have heard from the local mayor, selectmen, and assemblymen, as well as townspeople.”

Not that our governor-in-absentia cares. But his heir apparent might.

Most of the vetoes hit hardest in the small cities and midsize towns that Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey must carry in order to win this November’s election for governor. In 2002, the Romney-Healey ticket lost in the state’s 10 largest cities but won the rest of the state by nearly 200,000 votes.

So far, Healey has kept silent about Romney’s line-item vetoes, even as local anger has sent lawmakers of both parties scrambling to undo them. She prefers to address the cuts only in the aggregate, characterizing them as a check on overspending Democrats who would raid the state’s rainy-day fund. “The first priority of the lieutenant governor is fiscal discipline,” says Nate Little, Healey-campaign spokesperson. “Not squandering the rainy-day surplus when it’s not raining.”

Healey has only once publicly commented on any of these vetoes, and that was to say she would not have vetoed $11 million of job-training funds from the economic-stimulus bill, as her boss did. Little could not cite another cut that Healey opposes — but would not say that she necessarily agrees with each one, either.

That ambiguity is golden for Healey. If she says she agrees with a locally unpopular veto, she alienates potential voters. But if she says she disagrees, it suggests that she’s not really as active a partner in the administration as she claims — after all, she is the governor’s official liaison to the municipalities. “You can’t say you’re a partner and then not be accountable,” says Tim Murray, Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor.

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Few of the state’s 351 municipalities were spared the ax in the governor’s recent line-item spending vetoes. Here is a partial list of funding approved by the legislature but nixed by Mitt Romney. Many of these will be put back through veto overrides.

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